Ls&Qs&Cs: Fantasies and Lies and Backlashes

Here’s another Links & Quotes & Comments post about… recent events. What’s going on. The continued pandemic and Fox News’ complicity. How Republican strategies are making everything worse. About the suppression of Maus and its consequences. And the root of the Republican/conservative backlash: Obama.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 31 Jan 2022: Fox News wanted viewers to hear an anti-vax trooper’s story – until he died of COVID

This was the state trooper who resigned rather than take a vaccine, and who told Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee to “kiss my ass.”

Fox News has tried to turn workers who refuse vaccine mandates into culture war heroes, even though the network itself voluntarily imposed a requirement that its own employees be either vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 daily. LaMay became the latest such figure in October, after he resigned from the state police rather than follow Washington state’s vaccine requirement.

The network’s hosts and others on the right promoted LaMay’s story and presented his refusal to take a lifesaving drug as an example their audiences could emulate. But once his 15 minutes of fame were over and he could no longer be used to further the right-wing agenda, LaMay became expendable – his passing from the virus has not been mentioned on Fox as of posting time.

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Meanwhile Jesuit priest James Martin, in NYT, asks, How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?.

The problem is that even a mild case of schadenfreude is the opposite of a “Christian value.” Jesus asked us to pray for our enemies, not celebrate their misfortunes. He wanted us to care for the sick, not laugh at them. When Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves, he says to one of them, according to Luke’s Gospel, not “That’s what you get,” but “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Schadenfreude is not a Christian value. It’s not even a loosely moral value.

OK, fine. But nowhere in his essay does the Father assign any blame to the unvaccinated, not just for their own deaths, but for propagating a pandemic that might have gone away by now had everyone gotten vaccinated when asked to, a year ago. (I feel no sympathy for likes of Robert LeMay. Here’s another link from The Independent about this.)

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As if we need reminding…

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 16 Dec 2021: Fox Hosts Knew—And Lied Anyway

“What makes Fox News unique is not that it is conservative, but that its on-air personalities understand that telling lies is their job. Their texts on January 6, and their conduct since, leave no other conclusion,” Adam Serwer writes.

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Paul Krugman, NYT, 31 Jan 2022: Guns, Germs, Bitcoin and the Antisocial Right

About Republican responses to Texas’s energy crisis, support for the spread of the coronavirus, and school shootings. And cryptomining. Recalling Hobbes.

Which is why I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’s dystopian state of nature. We won’t try to keep guns out of the hands of potential mass murderers; instead, we’ll rely on teacher-vigilantes to gun them down once the shooting has already started. We won’t try to limit the spread of infectious diseases; instead, we’ll tell people to take drugs that are expensive, ineffective or both after they’ve already gotten sick.

In the end, none of this [Republican solutions] will work.

Government exists for a reason. But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making all of our lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.

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Moving on to Maus. Do those folks in Tennessee have any regrets, do you suppose? I’m guessing not; they’re secure in their righteousness.

Slate, Daniel Politi, 30 Jan 2022: Sales of Maus Soar After a Tennessee School Board Banned the Book.

Slate, Aymann Ismail, 31 Jan 2022: There’s a Simple Reason That Demands to “Ban” Books Like Maus Are Soaring, subtitled, “And it’s not only coming from the right.”

Part of it is social media, so that the news of one insignificant school in Tennessee can have an immediate impact across the country. This is an interview with associate professor (at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Emily Knox, who says,

It’s not that this is new. It’s that the people who are bringing the challenges are able to speak to each other much more easily. Social media has exacerbated the problem a lot. So Maus was just banned in Tennessee. We might hear it gets banned in Oregon tomorrow, which would not have been true before social media. This is a phenomenon that’s been around forever, but because people are able to communicate much more easily, it’s manifesting differently.

What is the underlying fear?, asks the interviewer. Knox:

People are trying to get books like Maus banned because they are afraid that if their children read them, they will have different values than the values their parents want them to have. That’s really what this is about.

And this is becoming increasingly harder as the world becomes more and more interconnected, through the internet. (Thus the prevalence in recent decades of home schooling — shield the kids from the outside world!) This is an arc of history that will erode fundamentalist religious and historical beliefs, one would hope. But I’m not sure how well this is working out in the US.

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Related:

Daily Kos, Marissa Higgins, 31 Jan 2022: If this anti-science bill becomes law in Oklahoma, we can’t be surprised when teachers simply quit

Oklahoma wants parent to be able to sue teachers if children are taught things that offend religious beliefs. Science? Be careful!

The bill would apply to grades kindergarten through 12. Notably, the language of the bill specifies the person in question could not promote these beliefs “in the classroom or at any function of the public school,” which assumably refers to activities like field trips. So, where is the line? Are teachers allowed to take students to science museums? Natural history expeditions? Show documentaries from reputable producers like PBS?

These questions go back to the core point here: Whose religious beliefs are we really talking about? How do we determine what it means to be “closely held” in a secular setting? At what point do we take into consideration the “closely held” religious beliefs the teacher or school staff might hold, and what if those beliefs oppose or simply contrast with that of one or many students in the classroom? Educators have enough on their plates as it is—worrying about the (personal) “closely held” beliefs of every person in their classroom is unreasonable and frankly inappropriate. Their job is to teach factual importation and develop critical thinking skills, not bend over backward to affirm the teachings of religion.

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Finally, public Facebook post by Occupy Democrats:

Deep down, everyone knows this is true. Obama’s election unleashed the darkest forces in American politics, through no fault of his. Both sides are not “divisive.” One side wants America for and by White people, and the other is fighting for the multiracial democracy that Americans were promised, and that we desperately MUST achieve to remain united.